Was 1999 the best year in motion pictures? The Toronto Film Festival’s artistic director Cameron Bailey and programmer Brad Deane seem to think so, and they’ve got a lineup of 23 movies to prove it. With titles as diverse as Three Kings, the animated Iron Giant and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the series “1999: Movies at the Millennium” will run at Toronto’s Lightbox from Jan. 6 through Feb. 10.

“We are both old enough to remember 1999,” says Bailey, 55. (Deane will cop only to being “considerably younger.”) Working as a film critic at the turn of the century, says Bailey, “I remember even then really being struck by what a strong year for films it was.” With the promise and possible peril of Y2K on people’s minds, many of the year’s titles “seemed to reflect a growing uncertainty with how we perceived the world.”

That includes The Matrix, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich and M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit The Sixth Sense, with its famous revelation.

At the same time, Deane was aware of 1999 being a strong year in international cinema. And so the series also includes such foreign-language titles as Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, and several titles from France, including L’humanité, Pola X and Time Regained.

There are also powerful films from female directors, including first features from Kimberley Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry), Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher) and Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides). “There were these remarkable films by women that were exploring gender that I don’t think was front of mind for a lot of critics at the time,” says Deane. “That debate has become much more front and centre.”

The list is of course incomplete, and Deane sorely wishes he could have secured the Canadian rights to Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy. But, says Bailey: “Lists invite criticism; we want to hear what people think is missing.”

The Lightbox program is notably light on comedy – no Austin Powers, Galaxy Quest, Bowfinger or Mystery Men – and one could argue that the year wouldn’t have been the same without The Limey, The Blair Witch Project, The Green Mile or The Buena Vista Social Club, all no-shows. On the plus side, no Deuce Bigalow, The Mummy or Big Daddy.

Of course, the question of what makes for the greatest year in movies can never have a definite answer, which is part of the fun. Did ’99 outshine ’39, with its Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach and Rules of the Game? Was ’68 a better bet, featuring 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt and Planet of the Apes? Or did 2007 best them all by giving us Once, Persepolis, Into the Wild, Juno and No Country for Old Men?

Full disclosure: I’ve always had a soft spot for 1984, thanks to The Terminator, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Footloose, The NeverEnding Story, Beverly Hills Cop, This Is Spinal Tap, Amadeus, All of Me, The Natural, A Passage to India, Splash, Red Dawn and Top Secret! But 1999 comes close.

And it was a year of incredible originality and creativity. Of the top 20 films at the box office in 1999, only four – Star Wars: Episode I, Toy Story 2, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and James Bond in The World is Not Enough – were part of a franchise. 2018’s top 20 had only four that were NOT remakes or sequels. And one of those was The Meg.

Says Deane: “It’s not just that it was a singular year cinematically. People were thinking heavy thoughts about what it was to shift from one millennium to another.” And that came through in “far out” choices for some directors, like David Fincher’s Fight Club, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. “I couldn’t imagine those being made in the same way again.”

1999: Movies at the Millennium opens Jan. 11 at the Lightbox in Toronto. More information at tiff.net/1999.

Throughout the year, the National Post will be running an occasional series celebrating the films that made 1999 one of cinema’s high-water marks. We’ll include comments from reviews that ran in the Post when the films were originally released. First up, next week: The Sixth Sense, to coincide with the release of M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film, Glass.